May 2014

May 27, 2014

We had a great time selling books and meeting authors at the 2014 annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association.

We were excited to congratulate Marc Hertzman for winning an Honorable Mention from the Bryce Wood book award committee for his book Making Samba. The award is for an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.

See even more photos on our Facebook page. And if you couldn't make it to LASA, don't worry, you can still buy all the great books we featured there at 30% off. Check out the program ad, and use coupon code LASA14 when you order on our website.

May 26, 2014

In celebration of what would have been Rachel Carson’s 107th birthday tomorrow, we are happy to honor her legacy with a post including several journal articles that relate to her life and work. Famous for Silent Spring (1962) among many other projects, Carson is credited with influencing the modern environmental movement and inspiring a change in national pesticide policy and a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses.

In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor investigates the role of futurity in queer ecocriticism how the figure of a spinster can help to resolve tensions between two schools of thought. Read an excerpt:

Attempting to discredit Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote to Dwight D. Eisenhower and asked ‘why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.’ Benson’s attack, its misogyny at best thinly veiled, makes legible one of the central challenges to developing a queer ecocritical practice: the status of futurity. Contemporary environmentalism, especially given the recent emphasis on sustainability, tends to be future-oriented, its rhetoric predicated on matters of inheritance and procreation alike…. Much recent queer theory, by contrast, insistently resists futurity, marked as it often is by heteronormative imperatives. What does it mean, then, to develop a queer ecocriticism?

“The New York School of Urban Ecology” by Jamin Creed Rowan argues that Rachel Carson’s ecological voice helped change the tone of the New Yorker and “helped solidify a literary and intellectual tradition that infused the city’s social networks with social value.” Read an excerpt:

Although Rachel Carson is perhaps best remembered for dramatizing the environmental consequences of pesticide in Silent Spring (1962), many readers first discovered here in the New Yorker writing about the sea--not DDT. Edith Oliver, a staff editor at the New Yorker, recommended Carson’s manuscript for The Sea Around Us to editor-in-chief William Shawn in 1950. Shawn was even more enthusiastic about this relatively unknown naturalist and offered to buy nine of the book’s fourteen chapters. He then condensed these chapters and published them, rather unusually, as a three-part series in June 1951 under the magazine’s “Profiles” rubric. While recognizing the significance of Carson’s New Yorker publications for her subsequent career, critics have found it difficult to explain her appearance in a magazine targeted, according to founder Harold Ross, at ‘persons who have a metropolitan interest.’

May 23, 2014

Next week publishers, booksellers, librarians, and media will converge on the Javits Center in New York City for Book Expo America, the largest publishing trade show in North America. Publishers are eager to get the word out about new titles, and there are also lots of deals being done. Foreign rights are sold, printers lobby for business, and digital companies of all kinds promise they are the future of publishing.

Will you be attending BEA? If so, we hope you'll stop by our booth, #1542. We will have lots of advance review copies (ARCs) to give away as well as some cool totebags. Marketing Manager Emily Young and Sales Manager Michael McCullough will be in the booth to chat and answer questions. For booksellers, we are offering a show special of 50% off all backlist if you place your order with Michael or your sales rep by June 16.

Check out some of our featured titles below.

Heading to the beach this summer? Will it be a pristine national park, or a tiny strip of sand between the water and high-rise developments, studded with ugly groins and seawalls? The Last Beach by geologists Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper is an urgent call to save the world's beaches while there is still time. Pilkey and Cooper sound the alarm in this frank assessment of our current relationship with beaches and the grim future if we do not change the way we understand and treat our irreplaceable shores. Combining case studies and anecdotes from around the world, they argue that many of the world's developed beaches, including some in Florida and in Spain, are virtually doomed and that we must act immediately to save imperiled beaches.

A bestseller in Tibet until it was banned by China, My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone is a moving memoir chronicles Naktsang Nulo’s childhood in Tibet’s Amdo region during the uprising against the Chinese invasion of the 1950s. He depicts pilgrimages to monasteries, including a 1500-mile horseback expedition his family made to Lhasa. A year or so later, they attempted to flee by the same route as troops of the People's Liberation Army advanced into their area. Naktsang's father was killed in the fighting that ensued, part of a little-known wave of unrest that took place throughout Amdo in 1958, as Tibetans rose up against the imposition of social and religious reforms by the Chinese forces. During the next year, the author and his brother were imprisoned in a camp where, after the onset of famine, very few children survived.

Many television critics, legions of fans, even the President of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. On The Wire is a sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama by leading film scholar Linda Williams (author of Screening Sex and editor of Porn Studies). She argues that while the series is a powerful exploration of urban dysfunction and institutional failure, its narrative power derives from its genre. The Wire is popular melodrama, not Greek tragedy, as critics and the series creator David Simon have claimed.

May 22, 2014

The United Arab Emirates has a long tradition of bringing in workers from other countries, particularly for construction jobs. Many come from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, among other countries. Some stay only until their job is done and send most of their wages back to their families in their home countries. Others bring their families with them and remain for generations. None of these immigrants, regardless of the length of their stay, are able to attain citizenship in the UAE, even though they now make up 85% of the population.

Workers' dormitory in Dubai. Photo by Neha Vora.

Recently, the New York Times investigated the treatment of those workers in the construction of NYU’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, and found that they live and work in shockingly poor conditions. Despite the labor protections set forth by NYU to their contractors in Abu Dhabi, many of these workers work 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, and can live with up to 14 other men in a room.

The UAE’s disregard for the rights of its non-citizens is not new. In Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai’s Indian-dominated downtown to explore the lives of these “temporary guest workers”, who have flooded into the UAE since the 1970s. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, these workers are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. Vora notes, “Certain expatriates are welcomed into the UAE and governed through technologies and rhetorics of a free and open market that purportedly allows anyone to succeed if they perform neoliberal self-enterprising subjectivities, while others are deemed insignificant and invisible to the fabric of the city-state. ...Those who constitute exceptions to citizenship, like Indians in Dubai, are, by virtue of their exclusion, necessary to defining the parameters of citizenship and the legitimacy of the state. That is to say, their everyday practices, performances, and rhetorics actually prop up the citizen-noncitizen divide and the authoritarian patrimonial governance system through which they are regulated as outsiders.”

Interested in learning more? Impossible Citizens provides great information about the history of guest workers in the UAE. Check out the introduction here.

May 20, 2014

In this week's New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wonders why we all feel so busy. Twentieth-century economists like John Maynard Keynes believed the problem of the future would be that people would have too much leisure time. Instead, the wealthiest among us claim to have the least leisure time and consumers keep finding new goods that they need to work longer hours in order to buy. Meanwhile, unemployment continues to vex most economies.

Two recent books from Duke University Press add to this discussion about time and leisure. Sarah Sharma builds on the work of Marxist critics of speed and time who have argued that the capitalist tools of clocks and schedules is central to the history of capital and social control. Her book In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics looks past the macro world and into the ways individuals experience time in their lives, bodies, and the spaces they inhabit. She compares business travelers, taxi drivers, and yoga instructors and finds it's not as simple as you'd think to say who feels the most disrupted by our sped-up temporal culture. Sharma also deliniates goals for challenging the culture: "While advertisers and capitalists are quick to portray a world speeding up, the work of the critical Left is not to confirm this world and simply flip it on its head, merely exposingt it as corporate, capitalistic, dehumanizing, and antidemocratic. Instead, the goal of critical thought is to rescue the politics of time from domination by structures of power." Listen to an interview with Sarah Sharma here and read the introduction to In the Meantimehere.

In her book The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Kathi Weeks argues we should be asking why it is accepted that we must work to live and live to work. Why, she wonders, is there not more resistance to this idea? She looks at so-called utopian demands for a shorter work week or a guaranteed universal income, and argues that these reforms would actually be a sensible way to address the issues of unemployement and overwork. A universal living wage would, she says, "not only to improve the conditions of work but challenge the terms of its dominance. These demands do not affirm our right to work so much as help us to secure some measure of freedom from it." Watch an interview with Kathi Weeks here and read the introduction to The Problem with Workhere.

Take a break from your own work to read these great books on time and labor!

May 19, 2014

Within the past year, several journal issues have tackled the topic of digital and new media in literature, humanities, and culture. Sample these articles and issues below.

The most recent issue of differences, "In the Shadow of the Digital Humanities," includes articles on opening the genealogy of the digital humanities, gaming the humanities, and working the digital humanities. Read an excerpt from Fiona M. Barnett's article, "The Brave Side of the Digital Humanities," featured in this issue:

While standing against the wall in a windowless conference room and scrolling through the tweets for the "Dark Side of the Digital Humanities" conference session, the tone of the real-time digital conversation was so counter to my understanding of the panelists' discussion that I briefly wondered if I was in the wrong room or following the wrong Twitter stream. Even after confirming the correct hashtag for the session, the uncertainty persisted until I recognized the same scholars in the room and in the Twitter stream. The concept of recognition and misrecognition has provided a useful framework for many questions in feminist theory, gender studies, and political theory, and it continues to offer a useful framework for considering disciplinary boundaries and the conversations that thake place in the lore of field formation.

Read the rest of "The Brave Side of the Digital Humanities," made freely available, here.

For further reading on American Literature, check out "Chavez Behind the Camera," a guest post by Emily Dings, managing editor of American Literature, here. The post details the relationship between several articles in "New Media and American Literature" and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

May 16, 2014

Although the votes are still being counted, India's long-ruling Congress party has conceded the national elections to the BJP. Many voters gave frustration with corruption as their reason for voting for the clean sweep. Young Indians in particular are looking to new leadership to develop their economy.

Akhil Gupta opens his recent book Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India with this question: "Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty? Why do regimes whose legitimacy depends upon bettering the lives of the poor continue to allow anywhere from 250 million to 427 million to live below the poverty line?" He argues that red tape and corruption are a form of violence against the poor, causing millions of deaths.

Although the poor in India may not wield economic power, they have long been considered an important group for politicians to court. But this year's elections brought a larger turnout from urban voters than in the past. To many, the young urban Indian working in a tech company is the sign of the future, but Gupta counsels against forgetting about the importance of agriculture to the Indian economy: "Agriculture has recorded the slowest growth rates of teh secotrs in the Indian economy. Agriculture is the only place where the vast majority of the unemployed and underemployed population can find employment in the short and medium term, but that will not happen if there is slow growth in this sector." Gupta also cautions against rising inequality: "It is not just the widening economic distance created by the conjunction of class and sectoral differences that is of concern. Equally important is the fact that the lives and experiences of many people who are part of the new global economy are increasingly cut off from those the urban, and especially, rural poor. For most of the urban middle-class there is no possibility of understanding, let along sympathinzing, with the struggles faced by poor people."

The new government under Narendra Modi must adopt policies that aid all Indians, or they may find themselves out of office in a few years. Unlike in the U.S., Indians on average vote half their politicians out of office at each election.

Read more of Red Tape for great background to today's election news. Check out the introduction here.

May 12, 2014

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Please enjoy this guest post by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkunmagazine. Named after the Jewish concept of mending and transforming a fragmented world, Tikkun offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives.

In addition to editing Tikkun, Rabbi Lerner is chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the author of eleven books, including Jewish Renewal, The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and Embracing Israel/Palestine. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley and San Francisco, California.

On the one hand, Jews are deeply grateful that America provided us with a safe haven when so many other Christianity-dominated cultures had represented us as demon Christ-killers and created the preconditions for the rise of both secular and religious anti-Semitism. American Jews rejoiced in the promise of freedom and equality before the law, and played a major role in organizing, shaping, and leading social movements that could extend that promise to all of America’s citizens. The role of the United States in defeating Nazism at the expense of so many American lives remains an enduring source of pride even for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in World War II, and an enduring source of appreciation for this amazing country. And the generosity of the American people toward Jews has made it possible for us to thrive and feel the kind of safety we haven’t felt for two thousand years of exile and diaspora.

On the other hand, Jewish well-being in America came not because this society didn’t seek scapegoats, but rather because it already had a scapegoat long before most Jews arrived on these shores—African Americans, Native Americans, and other targets (most recently, feminists, homosexuals, and “illegal” immigrants). While other immigrant groups from Europe found their safety in part by identifying with the dominant culture and becoming “white” (a social construct for all light-skinned people who bought into the existing systems of privilege and power), a significant section of the Jewish people in the past 150 years of presence in the United States chose instead to identify with the oppressed—most significantly with African Americans, but also with the poor (of which we were a significant part in the years 1880-1940), the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry.

Was this simply a matter of self-interest from a new immigrant group seeking to find a way to integrate into the society? If so, why wasn’t it chosen with equal energy by the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, etc.? In my view, Jews chose this path because of two radical messages in the Torah:

1. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that you were “the Other” (ha’ger), so when you come into your own power, do not oppress the stranger, but instead, Love the Other.

2. Do not accept reality as it is currently constructed—there is a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” (reality as given) to “that which ought to be” (the utopian possibilities of a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and joyous celebration of the universe). We called it YHVH—mistranslated as Jehovah, but actually a concept rather than a name, calling our attention to the reality that the world could be fully transformed and that we humans were created in the image of that force and with the responsibility to do tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world). It was this heritage that seeped into the collective unconscious of the Jewish people and that made us flock to social change movements in numbers not only out of proportion to our percentage of the population, but also more frequently than many other immigrant groups.

Unfortunately, the allure of fitting in and becoming like everyone else had a particularly strong effect on the distinctively American kind of Judaism that emerged in the temples and synagogues of American life. Seeking to imitate the decorum and respectability that WASPS had shaped for themselves, Jews in America created a Judaism that became increasingly like the other conformist religions of American society, embracing capitalist values and embracing patriotism even when it led to supporting American imperialist assumptions about the rest of the world. This new American Juadism sought to empty itself of its connection to the awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the universe that had been central to the Judaism of the past. Who can blame those in the post-Holocaust American Jewry who wanted safety and security? Yet the Judaism they tried to pass on to their children lacked the spiritual depth and political radicalism that had been at the heart of Judaism’s appeal.

The result? An increasing disaffection with Judaism in post-1950s America, and with it a decline in the ability of subsequent generations to find within Judaism its spiritual depth or its challenge to the materialism and selfishness that increasingly have come to dominate both public and private life in the early twenty-first century. But if Judaism was merely Americanism, our children asked, then why should they have to bother with all the distinctive religious practices meant to keep Jews a distinct religion, and why bother with a God that urged us to challenge the status quo when that status quo seemed so welcoming and its material benefits so enticing?

So this is the conflict that remains the enduring heritage of American Jews: an internal tension over whether to adopt mainstream values and a celebration of “that which is,” thereby fitting in with the cultural assumptions of the world’s largest imperial power, or to challenge those values, a challenge which not only leads to “speaking truth to power” in the larger society but also to challenging the Jewish community’s blind loyalty to an Israeli state that itself is committed to being “a nation like all other nations,” with its blindness to the suffering of the Palestinian people and its arrogance and hypocrisy as it attempts to turn Judaism into a cheerleader for immoral policies.

The good news is that even as many young Jews reject Judaism, they nevertheless have inherited a memory of the values that Judaism sought to inspire, and so many have joined in a wide variety of prophetic enterprises to reclaim Jewish spirituality and/or rebuild a Jewish social justice consciousness. This social justice consciousness goes far beyond the paltry platitudes of the Democratic Party and proclaims the need for a radical reconstruction of our world to save it from the environmental destruction that our Torah taught us would be the inevitable consequence of failing to build a society based on justice, love, generosity, and environmental sensitivity. We at Tikkun magazine, which is published by Duke University Press, are in the vanguard of this movement, on the one hand building a Jewish renewal spiritually and politically, and on the other hand recognizing that the global changes that are needed require an overcoming of all forms of national chauvinism and embracing a new ethos: the caring society—caring for each other and caring for the earth.

In this way, the particularism of American Judaism is morphing into a universalism. To help that happen, we have created the Network of Spiritual Progressives, an interfaith group that is welcoming to secular humanists of every stripe as well. The Network of Spiritual Progressives calls for a New Bottom Line in the United States and around the world, based on our understanding that our well-being as Jews and as Americans depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself.

Perhaps the Network of Spiritual Progressives, with its call for a Global Marshall Plan and an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which would require public funding of all national and state elections, banning all other monies in elections from any private or corporate or political source and requiring the larger corporations to prove a satisfactory history of social and environmental responsibility every five years to a jury of ordinary Americans) may be the fullest realization of the American Jewish Heritage. And it is in supporting, nay insisting, that the only practical and realistic way to save the planet from environmental destruction and/or some new form of elitist plutocratic fascism is to be prophetic, unrealistic, and utopian that Jews in America may still have an important role to play.

We always enjoy meeting our customers face-to-face and library conferences give us a great opportunity to do that. These meetings bring together publishers, librarians, consultants, and vendors and create unique conversations that often lead to big ideas, both for libraries and for us.

If you see Duke Press at a conference, we hope you'll stop by and say hello. We would love to meet you and have a conversation about challenges, successes, new trends, and what we can offer to lighten a burden or be more helpful in the future.

The next library conferences we will be attending are the Canadian Library Association annual meeting, International Federation of Library Association annual meeting, and the Frankfurt Book Fair.